Hem

Currently listening to: Departure and Farewell by Hem; there was a plug in the New Yorker with a nice video sample so I checked out the site and there was the album for sale, lossless format, fair price; why wouldn’t I just buy it instantly?

Now, not every band is gonna get noticed in the New Yorker; but if you get noticed somewhere, and you have a nice sample, and your site will sell me the music, uncompressed, with a couple of clicks, I’m probably gonna buy it right there. And I don’t think I’m that eccentric.

The songs are very pretty and Sally Ellyson’s singing has got to touch your heart if you have one. The playing and arrangements have an effortlessly light touch, the kind it takes serious effort to achieve, something I appreciate more and more with the passing decades.

One gripe on the production: Instruments and voices well-captured, but emerging here and there from black silence, no sense of an enclosing room or live ensemble, a band leaning forward and back into the flow of the song.

More producers ought to go and listen to what their counterparts did in the Fifties and Sixties by putting bands in a room and pointing a high-quality microphone at them. Or, to the Cowboy Junkies.

I put an LP from way back then on the turntable and it creates the illusion that the musicians are at the other end of the room, and I know perfectly well it’s not the ineffable wonderfulness of vinyl, it’s because the musicians were actually there and the producer was capturing the track, not constructing it ex post facto.

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